11 Cool Command Line Programs You Need to See

📝 Some tips based on questions I've seen a couple times: • For basically all of these, you need to run them from within the command line, NOT by double clicking, otherwise it will just pop up the cmd window and immediately close. On recent versions of Windows, you can do this by right clicking in the folder with the exe and clicking "Open in Terminal". If you don't see the option this tutorial page might help: www.elevenforum.com/t/add-or-remove-open-in-termin… • To make it so you can run the 'cheat' program (and any others you want) without having to navigate to the folder containing the exe file first, you can add the location of such exe's to the so-called "PATH environment variable". Basically Windows has a built-in list of locations in Windows, where if an exe is in one of those locations, you can still run the program by doing like "cheat.exe" even if the cmd window isn't opened in the same folder as the exe. This video is a good tutorial on how to edit this setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGRw1bgb1gU

"FFMPEG: The most widely used multimedia transcoder on at least two planets" - The team behind ffmpeg added this into a presentation because Nasa uses it in some of their rovers on Mars to transcode their videos before sending back to Earth.

0:00 - Intro 0:20 - Cheat 3:34 - YT-DLP ( video downloader ) 4:30 - ImageMagick ( format converter ) 6:16 - FFmpeg ( edit / convert mp4 ) 7:11 - Err.exe ( cheatsheet for errors ) 7:50 - ExifTool ( metadata edit ) 8:44 - Pandoc ( convert ) 9:22 - PDFCPU ( edit secured pdf ) 11:03 - XPDF Tools ( pdf convert ) 11:44 - Tokei ( source code stats ) 12:12 - Hyperfine ( speed of commands )

If you want GUI based tools or are scared of the command line here are some: Open Video Downloader is a front-end for yt-dlp and FFmpeg Handbrake is a front-end for FFmpeg IrfanView can edit images and shows all EXIF information and JPEG quality (press I) Mp3Tag can edit metadata of audio files but it can also edit video containers like MP4 and MKV including inserting images There are many more out there, tell us other good tools. 😀 Bit of history... outdated now but I remember using RazorLame which was a front-end for LAME for encoding MP3s back in 2003 in the Windows XP days. Now LAME lives on within FFmpeg.

a cli tool I've found to be useful is tldr. it takes the man/info commands from Mac/Linux, and and lists the most common uses for the command :)

honestly, my favorite is yt dlp. it's probably one of the most used tools out of this list by your average day to day person, and it's also the most useful one to me, somebody who constantly does editing, clipping, archiving etc.. thanks again for yet another fantastic video!

This video is a gem. I wanna jump into every single program you've compiled here right now.

Extremely epic and awesome and good

One of your best videos yet, thank you!!

I love your Videos. Unbelievably useful! Definitely saw some tools and features here that I was not aware of yet. Much appreciated mate.

I love ffmpeg, I use it all the time to split, merge, and compress videos. It's just makes me feel I have more control over the output than the gui video editors for mobile.

yt-dlp, imagemagick and ffmpeg are the power trio of "doing in your terminal in two seconds what some people rely on shady half-baked websites and bots for".

Extracting PDF images using either of the two tools you mentioned is a lot better than Windows + Shift + S or Cmd + Shift + S and selecting the region. Thanks for that!

Love it, We need part two please

Tokei is definitely my favourite, seeing how many files and lines of code i have written for a certain project is just so nice to have

May not quite fit the criteria you set for those tools you picked, but to add another one for people who prefer the console: winget It's included in Win 10 and 11 and lets you install and update a quite big variety of programs without having to hunt for their individual installation packages. Might not (yet) be as mighty as the linux equivalents (apt, dnf & co), but it's still a neat helper.

Omg this speeds up a lot of. I needed this!

This video has just made me love cmd. Thanks a lot, this has been very helpful

@ThioJoe you forgot unsilence, it removes the silent parts of videos and audio, its super nice

10:10 Paper tiger" is a calque of the Chinese phrase zhǐlǎohǔ The term refers to something or someone that claims or appears to be powerful or threatening but is not ...